Think of the children!

Or the youths, anyway, because today’s post is about the youth climate movement(s). What the children are doing, as far as I can figure from the Eco-Fair I attended a few weekends ago, is building trash castles out of paper towel tubes and excessive glitter. Remember trash castles? Did everybody else have to do those when we were kids? I still remember my dad’s comment that he’d rather have a million trash bags sitting around than a million of those things. Myself, I figured it was a great solution if you happened to have a paper towel tube surplus, but it didn’t go terribly far toward addressing nuclear waste.

(All of which is terribly unfair to the children’s climate movement, of course, which actually does someprettyamazingthings.)

But the point right now is youths, and specifically, the upcoming PowerShift event on October 21-23 in Ottawa. From their latest newsletter:

“This October, the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition will bring together over
one thousand young people from across Canada for two days of awesome
workshops and strategy sessions in Ottawa that will build to a MAJOR lobby
day on Parliament Hill on the third day. We will deliver our message of
change to our elected officials and push the federal government to take bold
steps in tackling climate change.

Youth of all backgrounds will come together to create a fresh, positive,
and inspiring vision of the future, one focused on our potential to overcome
the challenges of the 21st century, build a clean energy economy, create
green jobs, increase global equity, and revitalize our economy. Now is the
time for action. Now is the time for boldness.”

That is OCTOBER 21-23, everyone. The next day, October 24, is 350.org‘s International Day of Climate Action. According to their website, there are already six action events planned for Ottawa, so probably just about everybody’s going to stick around for that.

I still have no idea if I’m going; it depends if MEP is organizing an October 24 event in Montreal or not. I’ll keep you posted. (By “you”, of course, I mean the approximately six people who read this blog and aren’t involved with MEP in some way already. Whatever. Tell your friends.)

Anyway, if you want to get involved with PowerShift, contact Maggie if you’re an individual or Kimia if you’re an organization.